Oman Air probably has the best chance of all the Middle East carriers of surviving this downturn thanks to their policy of specialising in only short to medium haul operations. There's a great new interview on Youtube by Dantorp with their CEO who explains their fleet and route policies

I'm quite surprised. Can anyone explain why Oman Air is suspending DAC? And SIN? Why so many reductions these days? I Was really surprised when I knew that they were going to suspend BEY, one of the key destinations of Any Arab airline. Maybe BEY Was cancelled because it Was more Point to point traffic rather than connection traffic. It looks like not many passengers flying BEY to MCT were connecting after to India, Thailand, Pakistan, CAN etc...

Oman Air seems to be heavily focusing on India with additional capacity to Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Lucknow. In addition it has recently launched Salalah-Calicut. That equipment obviously needs to come from somewhere. I guess we're slowly finding out from where.

I saw an Oman Air 737 in Kochin the other day and it made me think - Oman really is very close to India. I think some of these smaller airlines need to find their own niche. They might do better in some of the smaller cities where there is less competition with shorter flying times to their hub. Muscat is the closest ME hub to India, so it makes sense to take advantage of this. One 737 can connect 3 or 4 cities per day to their network but only if they choose the cities that are close. Bangladesh is much further away and so it ties up a 737 all day that could be used more effictively on 3-4 shorter flights.

I saw an Oman Air 737 in Kochin the other day and it made me think - Oman really is very close to India. I think some of these smaller airlines need to find their own niche. They might do better in some of the smaller cities where there is less competition with shorter flying times to their hub. Muscat is the closest ME hub to India, so it makes sense to take advantage of this. One 737 can connect 3 or 4 cities per day to their network but only if they choose the cities that are close. Bangladesh is much further away and so it ties up a 737 all day that could be used more effictively on 3-4 shorter flights.

You're absoltely right. This make me think that if DAC failed, are they still considering CCU as their next India destination? Maybe Oman air avoids CCU because this market is completely absorved by ME3. We have 2daily 77W EK + 1daily 77W EY + 1daily 788 QR. It looks like Oman air prefers to expand it's network in unserved cities like Lucknow or Jaipur, which is a smart strategy. Maybe it sees Nagpur Pune or Amritsar as new possible destinations?

I think they´d do best to avoid too many faraway cities that already have a lot of competition. Better to focus on smaller cities that are 2-3 hours away. This provides good feed for their long-haul operations at Muscat at a low cost to them. Each 737 can provide connections to 2 or 3 indian cities per day, whereas if they start going further east they will spend more on fuel and flying hours for the same or less income because I doubt fares from Calcutta or Dhaka to London cost significantly more than flights from Jaipur, Cochin or Ahmedabad. Plus on these longer flights they also lose some of their advantage in terms of passenger convenience which also comes from the shorter flying times.

Just yesterday I flew from Ahmedabad to Istanbul via Kuwait and most of the passengers were connecting to the USA or the UK. The flight from India to Kuwait was almost 100% full of long-haul passengers. One thing India has in abundance is people. Every overnight train there has 22 carraiges and, despite 10 to 20 services per day between big cities, they fill up months in advance. Wherever you go everything is jam packed and the fares are high unless you buy a long time in advance. Sometimes it can be cheaper to fly from one place to another in India via Malaysia or Dubai.

WY increased KUL to double daily A330s from late June and this is going to bleed heavily as they don't have the network that the ME3 have nor the high P2P demand to sustain it. Once Hajj season ends in Sept, they will understand that this move was a mistake which needs to be trimmed down to 10-11 weekly maximum.

Yes WY announced India expansion plans in Feb with Del LKO HYD frequencies increased but BOM CCJ frequencies have not been published as yet though was stated to become triple daily each respectively.

Lahore too has been increased to 10 weekly with a mix of A333s and B738s which is good as P2P demand to MCT from Pakistan Punjab is growing rapidly as is LHE-GCC demand.

They literally cut Beirut, and launched Nairobi the next day. So I assume that peterinlisbon is correct.

It might be interesting to note that this is actually the second time that Oman Air quits Dhaka, the route was relaunched in October 2015. Oman Air previously served Dhaka around 2000 and quit soon after.